I am a practitioner of the ancient craft of wet shaving with a safety-razer; and have often noticed that I make a "Mussolini face" when shaving my neck - indeed it seems necessary in order to do a good job.
That is, I lift the chin, and pull-up and push-forward my mouth into a sort-of pout, in order to stretch and smooth-out the skin of the neck.
The face I make seems very ridiculous, and indeed laughter-inducing; but is only a slight exaggeration of M.'s favourite "heroic" pose.
My theory is that this is how Musso got the idea for his strange, and unique, pose. Presumably, as a young and aspiring Dictator, he saw himself in the mirror every morning making this weird face. But (being Mussolini) he thought:
"Hey, that looks cool! Maybe I should do it All The Time (whenever I remember), and people will be impressed!"
Apparently, some people were impressed.
And then he was stuck with it: It was what everybody expected.
6 comments:
The thrusting forward of the mouth seems like an excellent thing to me; can't think why I didn't discover this independently. I wet-shave by 'feel' in the bath and do a brief check in the mirror afterwards.
It recently occurred to me why some men are apparently so proud of their moustaches: because they advertise and give assurance of a stiff upper lip (in reality the muscles are relaxed, not stiff, of course).
So perhaps pride comes before the moustache and not vice-versa. Can't think why Benito didn't have one. Weirdly, the only photo I found of him with a moustache had his head declined slightly.
@Ron - Maybe M. was, like me, rather addicted to being clean-shaven? Whenever I have grown facial hair it makes me feel a bit seedy and dozy. Wet-shaving is part of waking-up properly; and I just don't get that from electric razers (which I have also tried, at times).
Charlton ha sempre ragione!
@Mal - https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2026/06/untranslated-foreign-is-defect.html
!?
Sorry, I forgot. Just a fascist slogan I remember from school: "Mussolini is always right!". I humorously applied it to you.
@Mal - Sadly, my school didn't teach us Italian fascist slogans - although I did learn some Soviet, and National Socialist sayings in the history classes.
But the latter phrases mostly came from war comics - e.g. Schweinehund!, Donner und Blitzen!, Hande Hoch!, Schnell, Schnell!, Gott in Himmel!, Jahwol Herr Leutnant! etc (Germans only shout with exclamation marks, apparently) - all of them have come-in very useful in conversing with my German in-laws.
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